[Buildroot] [PATCH] infra: Add a way to apply patches using git

[Arnout Vandecappelle]

On 03/11/14 16:01, Jérôme Pouiller wrote:
> On Saturday 01 November 2014 23:11:25 Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
>> Dear Arnout Vandecappelle,
>>
>> On Sat, 01 Nov 2014 23:06:23 +0100, Arnout Vandecappelle wrote:
>>>> We discussed this proposal at the last Buildroot Developers meeting.
>>>> Even though we understand the idea and some of us found it potentially
>>>> interesting, we didn't really like the implementation, but nobody
>>>> really found a way of implementing something like this in a nice way.
>>>>
>>>> One of the problem is that not all our patches are Git patches, which
>>>> you had to work-around in your patch in a way that isn't really nice.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe Arnout and Yann (in Cc) remember more of the issues that we
>>>> discussed at the meeting regarding this proposal.
>>>  
>>>  For simple patches, a simple diff is normally sufficient. For more
>>>  complicated> 
>>> stuff, it is really worthwhile to clone the upstream repository and work
>>> from there - you'll anyway need to do that to upstream the patches.
>>>
>>>  So we felt that the need for this feature did not outweigh the complexity
>>>  of> 
>>> its implementation.
>>
>> Ah yes, right: we thought that having a Git repository that isn't the
>> one from upstream made it unpractical to submit patches back to
>> upstream, and was making the entire feature a bit useless.
> I also worried about this restriction. My first idea was to recreate the link 
> between source directory and upstream repository with something like:
> 
>    cd $PKG_BUILD_DIR
>    git clone $PKG_SITE --bare .git

 This would only work if $PKG_SITE happened to be a git repository... But since
we prefer to use release tarballs, the usual situation should be that the
repository is somewhere else.

>    git config --bool core.bare false
>    git rev-parse $PKG_VERSION > .git/HEAD
>    git reset
> 
> However, my patch began to smell black magic. 
> 
> 
> Ideally, I wanted to create an external tool to do this. However, it is not 
> easy to integrate an external tool with Makefile system (For example, I did 
> not found any handy way to get variables associated with package).

 At the BR developer meeting, we had the feeling that the number of situations
where such a tool is useful is very limited, so that it is really not worth the
effort to invest in it.


 Regards,
 Arnout

> 
> 
> If anyone have ideas about this subject, I would be happy to work on and 
> resubmit a patch.
> 
> 


-- 
Arnout Vandecappelle                          arnout at mind be
Senior Embedded Software Architect            +32-16-286500
Essensium/Mind                                http://www.mind.be
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